Students Who Take Out College Loans Are Compulsive Gamblers; They Just Don't Know It

Veteran gamblers know that the casino always wins. You can put your chips on red or black, but the house makes money either way. Yet they still gamble because they're addicted.

College students who take out federal loans year after year are gambling addicts; they just don't know it. They believe their lives will improve if they get a college degree, but in reality, it's a crap shoot.

Whether you study engineering or sociology, your college will take your money, and even if you can't get a job with your fancy diploma, your alma mater won't give you a refund.

Indeed, the universities raise their tuition prices every year and don't even apologize for it. They know students and their parents will simply take out more loans to pay the higher freight costs.

The only way alcoholics can get their addiction under control is to stop drinking. Heroin addicts will only recover if they stop putting needles in their arms.

Likewise,  the only way college students can avoid ruining their lives by taking out federal loans they can't repay is to stop borrowing the money. 

For most students, a four-year degree in the humanities, liberal arts, or social studies is worthless. Studying sociology or gender studies is like playing slot machines. It's a sucker's game. There will be no life-changing jackpot.

Too often, students ruin not only their own lives but their parents' lives as well. If a kid wants to study at a snooty Ivy League casino, mom and dad will likely have to take out Parent Plus loans that the federal government will happily offer.  Whether little Johnny gets a job or even a degree, his parents' loans must be paid back with interest.

Millions of college students have ruined their lives because they took out federal loans for shoddy educational experiences. Often, their parents are burdened as well. And there is no bankruptcy relief for student loan debt.

Americans must abandon the illusion that colleges and universities are benign institutions that give fair value for the obscene price of a bachelor's degree. The colleges are casinos, and the administrators and bureaucrats who run them are hucksters and shills.

Colin Farrell in Ballad of a Small Player

Colleges peddling expensive liberal arts degrees are engaging in fraud

My professors defined sociology as the painful elaboration of the obvious and psychology [as] the painstaking study of human behavior by people who need to be studied.

Dan E. Dunlap

As Mike Rowe pointed out recently, "Nothing has gotten more expensive in the last 40 years than a 4-year degree. Not real estate, not healthcare, not energy, nothing.” Indeed, it now costs around $90,000 a year to attend a private college.

And it is not just the exclusive schools that charge nose-bleed prices.  Columbia University costs $93,000 a year, including tuition, housing, and books. Landmark College, a tiny, obscure Vermont school, is almost as expensive. The total cost of attending Landmark for one year is $86,000. 

Is a college degree worth a quarter of a million dollars? No, of course not. And though a case can be made that an undergraduate degree in accounting or business will eventually pay off, no one can defend the insane cost of obtaining a liberal arts degree at a private school.

Columbia, for example, a university riddled with anti-Semitic racism, offers degrees in sociology, gender studies, and Yiddish studies. What kind of job will a Columbia grad be qualified to fill with a degree in those fields?

Colleges across America fund degree programs in the humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences that don't give graduates useful job skills. Why aren't these programs closed down?

Two reasons. First, universities continue to offer degrees in these fields because they have tenured professors who staff liberal arts departments who are very difficult to fire. 

Second, hundreds of private colleges define themselves as liberal arts colleges. It would be tough for these schools to justify their existence if they scrapped their liberal arts majors.

In my view, colleges that charge outrageous tuition prices that force students to take out loans to obtain low-value degrees are engaging in fraud.  College students are beginning to figure that out, and that's why enrollment in liberal arts programs is declining.